• 35 YEARS OF BLISSPR – War Stories & Lessons Learned
• FINDING THE WIZARD OF OZ – Public Relations Demystified
• DRIVING THE GROWTH ENGINE – How to Develop New Business
• HOW TO CREATE THOUGHT LEADERSHIP – Online, Offline, Integrated

 Abby Carr, Meg Wildrick and Elizabeth Sosnow take turns in giving the courses with me.  The title of this blog, “Herding Cats,” was the subject of the fifth course, and they thought some of the highlights might be useful to our readers.

First, what’s different about leading a professional service firm?  The obvious answer is that our primary assets – people – go down the elevators every night.  They are fluid, not fixed.  Since our firm deals with very smart people in management consulting, law, accounting, executive search, asset management, insurance and other professional and financial services, our people have to be smart.  And, because our clients occasionally have healthy egos, our people have to have healthy egos too.

In short, the leader of a professional firm cannot treat people the way one might treat a machine that manufactures widgets.  Machines don’t ask “why?”  Our people almost always do, which means you should give them the answers before they ask the question.  Leadership becomes much more an exercise in developing consensus, as anyone who has been in any kind of successful partnership (e.g., marriage) can readily attest.

Second, as a recent president said, there’s the “vision thing.”  Now let me go on record and say that I am not a big believer in VISION STATEMENTS and MISSION STATEMENTS.  I think too often they waste hours of executive time – and lots of dollars – to produce something that is designed not to offend and is thoroughly non-differentiable from the competition. 

But leaders do need vision lest they sound Alice in Wonderland, to whom the Cheshire Cat said: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can get you there.”  Or worse they can sound like a long forgotten “leader” in the French Revolution, who John F. Kennedy famously quoted as saying: “there go my people; I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

Your people need better, and you need not hire consultants or establish task forces to figure it out.  I do not believe a vision needs to be grand – our vision in our early years was survival.  Once we got some critical mass, the vision had three primary components.  We wanted:

1. Measured growth.  You have to grow to create opportunities for your people, but you want to grow at a pace you can manage, one that will not burn you out or your people.
2. A great place to work.  Check.  We have been voted that in the Holmes Report four of the last six years.
3. To enable individuals to grow – including the management team – which has been together now roughly 20 years.

Our vision was achievable, a critical characteristic, and we communicated it regularly and measured ourselves against it. 

We’ll offer some other thoughts on a leading a professional firm in the weeks ahead.  Meanwhile, what do you think are the critical elements?  What do you think of vision and mission statements?

To reach John:

Phone:  212.840.0444 
Email: john@blisspr.com
LinkedIn:  John Bliss

This topic has come up a lot lately as we’ve come up to the end of the baseball season and the end of Derek Jeter’s current contract with the New York Yankees. Jeter has spent his entire pro career with the Yanks and has played a key role in the five World Series titles that they have won since 1996. He has consistently been working his way up the all-time hits list and – if he stays healthy – is on pace to become the first Yankees player to reach 3,000 hits some time next season. 

That all assumes, of course, that Jeter is back next year. I’m kidding – of course he’ll be back. But he is arguably coming off his weakest offensive year and will turn 37 early next season. Though his statistics might suggest he is on the downside of his career, he will likely get a better contract, either in terms of annual pay or number of years, than a generic player with similar stats. For a team that has made history a key component in its brand, Jeter and his legacy have a value that far exceeds that of a generic 37 year old infielder. Jeter is, after all, the face of the franchise.  

As a PR professional, I am often intrigued by the synergies and difficulties that come from the tight relationship between branding and the actions of key individuals. Sports are just one example, but you see examples every day – Oprah parlaying her personality and image into her own TV network, the wild swings in Apple’s stock price due to rumors about Steve Jobs’ health, Disney’s often futile efforts to control the off-screen image of its young TV personalities. 

The other side of this relationship, of course, is when an individual’s actions can harm the brand – or even threaten the health of an entire business. The years of hard work put into building the Martha Stewart brand were put in jeopardy in recent years through the actions of its namesake founder. And, of course, we have the obvious yet unavoidable example of Tiger Woods, whose extramarital affairs led to a virtual stampede of sponsors seeking to distance themselves from the former A-list ad fixture. 

In a world where businesses often refer to their people as their key operating asset, those people can make your business look good. They can also do lasting damage to the brand with one wrong move or they can drive a manager to make decisions that – by traditional measures – may not seem rational. I am reminded of a post last year in Jim Blasingame’s small business advocate blog entitled Beware the Two Edges of the Brand Sword where he wisely reminds companies to leverage the good edge of the brand sword so much that if your “ambassador’s” reputation should fall, the brand’s goodwill will overshadow any negative press.

What do you think? How do you control your branding when your brand is a person?

To reach Donna:

Phone:  212.584.5479
Email: donna@blisspr.com
Twitter: @donnamcsorley

Last week, I had the opportunity to make a presentation to the St. Louis chapter of PRSA on this topic – which is based on multiple conversations with my fellow BlissPR colleagues about how we help our clients achieve their business goals. 

B2B service companies are great clients because they stretch us to come up with a clear vantage point on technical and often enterprise level matters.   But they can also be tough clients because they are very busy, as well as risk averse and slow to adopt change.   When we are faced with creating a new campaign, here are some of the things we think about to get out of the traditional “lather, rinse, repeat” kind of PR.  Here is what I said in St. Louis – what have I missed?  (Want to make sure you see this, @tressalynne)

1. Raise the Altitude.  First, get up above product.  If you are discussing the features and benefits of what the company sells, you won’t get the audience’s full attention.  It’s like looking at photos of someone else’s kids.  Find out what the audience truly cares about, and focus on that.  Here’s a great example of a major financial company surfacing the issues of concern to its customers, who are heads of HR:  MetLife’s 8th Annual Employee Benefits Trends Study.
2. Carve out an Issue to Own.  Second, don’t be afraid to make an idea the hero of the moment.  The idea can be an issue, a trend, a topic area – think “privacy” or “motivation” or “risk” or “capital flows” — but it’s not the product.  Then build a microsite or a blog or a strong point of view around that.  We have seen consulting firms take this tack, and predict that corporations will do so as well.  
3. Be of Service to the Communities you Care About.  What does your client know that can help the communities that they serve?   How can you help them do their own business better?  Often, research, benchmark data, opinion, counsel can be packaged in a way that galvanizes decision-making.  Here’s an example: BDO’s Retail Survey.
4. Enter the Ongoing Conversation. If your client is discussing a topic that matters, and has a point of view or research that extends the conversation, then you better be finding the right dialogues, and the people (bloggers) who are influencing them.  Addict-o-matic is a great way to find them. 
5. Learn to Share.  Once you have created your content, deliver it in many forms and formats.  SMPRs, video, data nuggets, how to advice, predictions.   And don’t be afraid to partner with a media outlet to deliver all that content goodness.  Here’s an example of what we mean:  Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Study Identifies Best Companies for Leadership.
6. Don’t Hog the Microphone.  When your client is the only one talking –even if he or she is the smartest person in the room, it’s less interesting than if you invite other voices in to the discussion.  Open it up and more people will listen.    That’s what they found at McKinsey’s whatmatters microsite.   
7. Get Local.  If there’s a national trend – movement of some kind, whether it’s a rule change, a regulation, legislation – there will likely be local fallout.  Capture it!  People care about changes and problems happening in their own backyards, and are more likely to pick up the phone and call someone in their own area for help.
8. Build Your own Community.  In the old days, we used trade media to reach niche markets.  Not so much anymore.  Plus niche markets are getting nichier.  Sometimes you find them, sometimes you have to help your clients create them.  So if it’s CFOs of Canadian natural resources companies, or hospital facilities managers in the southwest, or med students who care about TB,  or meeting planners for financial services companies, sometimes it’s easiest to build your own audience.  

That’s what I came up with – what steps would you add? Click here to see the full deck or feel free to email me at abby@blisspr.com.

To reach Abby:

Phone: 212.840.0088
Email: abby@blisspr.com
Twitter: @abbycarr
LinkedIn: Abby Carr

Lee cites an article from the Harvard Business Review on customer loyalty in which the authors presented research showing that satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal.  Writes Lee: “on a scale of one to five [one being very unsatisfied and five  being very satisfied], a customer who marks a four is six times more likely to defect than a customer who marks a five.  In other words, there is a six-fold increase in customer loyalty between fours and fives.”  While Lee is examining patient/employee satisfaction and loyalty in hospitals, the implication for our industry is clear: loyalty is critical to the security of client-agency relationships – and therefore, it’s essential that we understand the distinction between satisfaction and loyalty. 

So, how can professional services PR firms build client loyalty?

1. Deliver quality work:  If your clients are not satisfied, they’re definitely not going to feel loyal to your organization.  Therefore, client satisfaction is a logical precursor to client loyalty.  While it might sound like common sense, it’s critical that you’re responsive to your clients and consistently provide quality work in a timely manner.
2. Anticipate your clients’ needs:  If you’re successfully delivering quality work, your clients are likely satisfied, but are they yet loyal?  Anticipating clients’ needs is an important step in moving from a four to a five on the client satisfaction scale – and making you an invaluable marketing partner.  According to Lee, “loyalty is generated by memorable things that happen that we didn’t expect.”  So, ask yourself: are you maintaining the status quo, or are you creating memorable moments by going “above and beyond;” consistently staying one step ahead of your clients and anticipating their needs, so they don’t have to.
3. Know your clients’ business:  In order to successfully anticipate your clients’ needs, you have to know their business, inside and out.  In a recent discussion with Dallas Kersey, former director of marketing at Towers Perrin and Edward Jones, he said the number one thing PR professionals can do to make themselves invaluable to their clients is to think of themselves as business professionals first, PR professionals second.  That is, “know your clients’ business.”  As Lee notes in his book, “doing everything to perfection…meeting all [of your clients’] standards of performance and courtesy” is not enough to build client loyalty.  As PR professionals, in order to build client loyalty, we must understand how everything we do fits into our clients’ overall marketing strategy and ultimately, how that’s tied to the company’s bottom line.  Without that understanding, you cannot cross the line from “outside agency” to true marketing partner.

These are just a few of the ways that you can work toward building loyalty.  What else would you add to this list?

To reach Aven:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: aven@blisspr.com
Twitter: @avenlea
LinkedIn: Aven James

1. Understand demographics:  A recent study of Corporate Counsel noted that 37% of the 30-39 year old age group had used Facebook in the past 24 hours and 48% have used it professionally in the past week. Do not forget that your senior partners – and their contacts – will retire sooner than you might think. Marketing will not always stay the same, even if you really, really want it to.
2. Harness LinkedIn:  There are probably more lawyers on this network than any other group combined. Your firm needs a profile and your partners need to take advantage of the networking opportunities, which will only increase over time.
3.  Deploy a targeted Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pilot: Your attorneys may not want to leap onto Facebook, but almost anyone is interested in the efficiency of their website traffic. What kinds of visitors come to the site? How long do they stay? What kind of content moves them to action? Take a look at what your Google Analytics are trying to tell you, then pick an important practice as a test case. Create content, deploy the right keywords and see if the traffic grows – that will get the attention of more than a few within the firm.
4. Improve your alumni and recruiting efforts: If you are a large firm, this is likely to be where you have a social media investment, if you’ve made one at all. Are they just a group you send information “at,” or are you building a genuine community?
5. Harvest analytics from every place you can find them: Email blasts, websites, search engine rankings and social networks each offer law firms a chance to finally analyze and “own” quantitative marketing information. Seize it!
6. Leverage legal marketing resources: There are lots of great thinkers in this space – set up a Google Reader so you can listen in. Some of my favorites are Jane Navarre, Heather Milligan, Nancy Myrland, Adrian Dayton and Kevin O’Keefe.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking about public relations for law firms…Now I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my career thinking about social media for law firms? What about you?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

After all, most attorneys market in order to do one thing: identify new business “leads.” But that’s not the only reason to develop an online marketing strategy.  What about positioning key practices as leaders on client sector trends?  Is it important to strengthen the firm’s brand equity in emerging markets? Can we extend the life of our current thought leadership with a new distribution system?

In short, you can. Here’s a copy of the presentation, if you’d like a deeper dive:

In the meantime, here are my first 5 tips for getting started:

1. Recognize that you don’t have to start by getting “social:” While it may be sacrilegious to say, it’s possible to derive a huge amount of value from social media without ever becoming, well, social. Instead, think of it as your firm’s competitive intelligence engine.  You have an opportunity to gain sector, competitor and client market insights – why would you pass that up?
2. Benchmark and compare trends over time: What happens if you check once and your competitor hasn’t entered the space? Does that mean they never will? Of course not. 96 of the AmLaw 200 are now blogging…only 39 were in August 2007. Keep gathering data to guide your marketing decisions and investments.
3. Evaluate aspirational marketing leaders: Large law firms know how to do many things well, from attracting laterals to extending global scope. But it’s still possible to learn from smaller firms who can sometimes be more nimble and almost certainly have been experimenting longer. Don’t make marketing decisions based on what your exact peers are doing. It’s short-sighted.
4. Construct early warning systems:  You already have Google Alerts set up to monitor your partners, practices and peers. Take it a step further and look for comments on blogs and message boards.
5. Think small: Somewhere in your firm there are emerging rainmakers that have the trust of senior partners. They are already essential in critical deals, they have keen insights about the direction of their marketplace and they are hungry for advancement. To top it off, they have a little more time than your major rainmakers. Why not let them experiment with some targeted engagement on a network such as Legal OnRamp?

Tomorrow I’ll give you six more reasons to consider if social media has a place for your law firm. But what would you add to the list so far?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

“But I need to stay on top of emerging trends,” I hear you say. “This next tool might be the key to a successful digital PR campaign.” It’s true — online engagement analysis is not for the weak of heart. But I tried to offer some hope during a May presentation in Shanghai to the Worldcom Public Relations Group, the world’s leading network of independently owned public relations firms:

My 7 Best Practices for Social Media Tool Adoption:

1. Understand your assessment context before you begin. Why do you want to test the tool? To help your staff? Outwit your competitors? Give a boost to a marketing campaign?
2. Pick 2 tools to experiment with at a time: You’ll wind up discarding over 50% of these tools, ultimately, but you need to keep experimenting and “churning.”
3.  Read “tool master” reviews to give you a sense of the pros and cons: Insights from smart people like Jason Falls help make my job easier.
4. Use colleagues to divide and conquer analysis: If you work for a PR agency, please don’t make the mistake of delegating this work to your junior staff. Senior PR practitioners need to understand how these tools fit within a larger marketing strategy.
5. Find online buddies who are having fun with the tool: It may not be your idea of giggles, but you still need to develop an educated opinion on why the tool is attracting attention, anyway.
6. Discard tools relatively quickly if you aren’t finding value: There’s always an emerging tool to replace a dud. But don’t assume that you can rule a tool out forever, the playing field can change instantaneously with the right upgrade.
7. Protect clients and employers by waiting to share tools until you are sure they are worth the time: Tools are the last “stop.” Start with Forrester’s POST approach, and fold the tools in later.

Take a peek at my 20 minute speech if you’d like to hear more about the tools I use daily to support our own digital PR strategy, including:

• Feedera: bundles your friends’ “most shared” Twitter content daily
• Bit.ly: offers a metrics dashboard to understand if your content excites people
• Backtype: flags keywords in blog comments
• Google Reader: organizes your RSS feeds, but has the potential to be your top competitive intelligence tool
• Wordtracker: identifies “starting point” keywords without the cost of an SEO

This presentation also shares the tools and networks that I’m experimenting with: 

• LinkedIn: Realize that “sleeping beauty” is waking up and has real potential for B2B companies
• Foursquare: Understand how acquiring audience location data could impact your marketing strategy
• Flowtown: Mine social data from your email address list
• Authority Labs: Track search engine positioning for your site’s critical keywords
• MobiReady: assess if your site is ready for mobile use
• Flickr: use visual tags to get lots of Google “love” 

Did I stop your “shakes?” How do you solve Social Media Tool Exhaustion?

P.S. My time in Shanghai wasn’t all work. Head over to my Flickr account to see a few pictures of our visit or to YouTube to see a couple of video clips of my favorite pavilions at the World Expo.

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

Social media has changed the way we develop and implement marketing and PR programs, and in doing so, has influenced the question: “to partner, or not to partner?” Today, traditional media partnerships can provide excellent content for social media campaigns. Partnerships now present an entry point, not a barrier, to additional coverage and ultimately, awareness for your brand and/or product.

A recent study by client Hay Group (a global management consulting firm) shows how traditional media partnerships can fuel social media campaign success. 

Study: Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com/Hay Group Best Companies for Leadership Study

Strategy: Partnering with an online outlet gave us the opportunity to develop a robust, proactive social media campaign to extend coverage beyond Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com and drive additional traffic to Hay Group’s website. As part of that strategy, we:

• Developed a social media press release (SMPR): We used Pitchengine.com to create a release that included video interviews with Hay Group’s consultants, pull-out data points from the study, an easy to “re-tweet” Twitter pitch, links to coverage of the study on Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com, and access to other relevant resources. Be forewarned – producing an SMPR can be time-consuming, but the result is a more comprehensive and exciting way to share your information. And, it’s more conducive to sharing online via Twitter, LinkedIn, blog comments, etc. It also can be a useful marketing tool to include in email campaigns, webinars and other marketing communications. 
• Conducted targeted outreach to leadership and HR bloggers: As Kevin Briody notes in his post The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach, the first step to conducting blogger outreach is to identify the right bloggers – and get to know them. There’s a robust community of bloggers discussing management and leadership issues that we were able to engage before, during and after the Best Companies for Leadership study was released. If you’re looking for bloggers who reach your target audience, there are a number of tools that will help you identify them, including Alltop, Google Blog Search and Technorati, to name a few.
• Initiated an awareness/engagement campaign on Twitter: As with blogger outreach, to effectively use Twitter to reach online influencers you must identify the right people and engage them. It’s critical that you’ve built your followers before you launch your social media campaign. Adam Holden-Bache provides 6 useful steps to find your B2B audience on Twitter in his post on Social Media B2B. 

Results: There are many ways to measure the impact of social media marketing, all of which should be based on a specific set of objectives, goals and tactics identified for your specific campaign. Below are a few metrics that we used to gauge the success of our campaign. Within the first month of the launch:

• The SMPR had been viewed more than 1,800 times, cited in more than 30 blogs (including On Leadership, Leading Blog, Three Star Leadership and Great Leadership, among others) and “Tweeted” by more than 350 people (with 356,650+ combined followers) 
• The ten leadership stories that appeared in the “Best Companies for Leadership” special section on the Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com were among the top five most-clicked stories on BusinessWeek.com for a few weeks post-launch
• Hay Group’s website received a boost in traffic, with more than 2,926 visits in the first 24 hours alone (a huge increase over average traffic)

There are many ways that traditional PR initiatives can be leveraged through social media. What tactics have you used?

To reach Aven:

Phone: 212.840.1661
Email: aven@blisspr.com
Twitter: @avenlea
LinkedIn: Aven James

It takes time, but skilled internal marketers understand how to shadow their business leaders. You anticipate needs, accommodate schedules, minimize disasters, coax ideas and frame business strategies.

Now you have a new challenge to conquer: helping your leaders leverage their individual and collective online presence.  This is especially tricky since your “client” may not have the time (or desire!) to start or join a conversation. The logical solution is potentially uncomfortable – the “shadow” has to step into the sunlight. You need to establish your own digital presence.

This feels uncomfortable for many, but you have both an opportunity and an obligation to help pave the way. 

1. Understand that this activity is an extension of what you are already doing…establishing and building the company brand
2. You can’t ignore the “social” in social media…and it’s entirely possible that your thought leader wants to
3. As a marketer, you can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. Your counsel depends on intimately understanding  opportunities and challenges in this landscape

So where do you start?

• Identify 3 Google Analytics benchmarks from your site: Share them with your thought leaders to help them focus on an achievable traffic objective. Aggressively gauge how the traffic changes.
• Develop a warning system: Use Google Alerts, Addictomatic, RSS of competitor blog feeds, Backtype and Board Tracker for your firm’s keywords. Note: marketing teams must divide and conquer this responsibility.
• Monitor existing conversation and turn it into actionable insight: Social Mention can help you listen. What’s being said now? Does it benefit your sector? How can it help your thought leader advance his or her cause?
• Bulk up your own presence on LinkedIn: It’s not just a pile of resumes, it’s a living set of contacts that are pre-disposed towards your colleague’s content. Look beyond your personal connections to identify Q&A’s and relevant groups. Learn what matters to them. Reach out and engage, using your key words as an entry “trigger.” Incorporate that intelligence into your marketing strategy.
• Establish your own Twitter feed – a company Twitter feed is not enough: Recent stats indicate that Twitter users share more than almost any other community. But most are more likely to respond to a person who engages. Your boss may not have time to tweet, so you’ll have to compensate for that with your own tweeting.
• Comment on Influencer blogs in your sector: You may need to jump start attention for your thought leader. If you feel uncomfortable making a comment yourself, don’t let that deter you from methodically reviewing blogs for opportunities for others to comment. This is the single most important way to build traffic for your company’s blog and/or website.
• Understand if your links resonate: Bitly and Tweetreach make this easy. Now take the time to compare and contrast what kinds of content yield a higher response from your audience. Regularly share your findings with your business line leaders.
• Measure your success: New dashboards like Swix offers unified social media metrics like blog traffic, subscribers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers. This is also the easiest way to quickly give a leader a snapshot of activity.
• Make it easy on yourself: Nutshell Mail brings your social media activity to you in a handy email that saves your time for other projects. Feedera shows you what content matters most to your friends and/or audience.

It’s a battle for most internal marketing leaders to develop a personal brand. But, last time I checked, shadows look best in direct sunlight.

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow

Why? In the 20 years I’ve spent helping clients develop content, I’ve noticed a critical (though perhaps blindingly obvious) fact. It’s pretty hard to become a thought leader. The hurdles include:

1. Analysis Paralysis: Your need to make something perfect essentially dooms the project.
2. Competitive Distractions: You are so focused on a competitor that you ignore your prospects.
3. Junior Partner Syndrome: You don’t believe your ideas are good enough.
4. Calendar before Content: You keep waiting for the right moment…that never comes.
5. Peer Review Ricochet: You need approval from an internal cast of thousands.
6. Your Idea is About You: Your audience is somehow supposed to “make the bridge” to why it matters to them.
7. You Make an Assumption About Your Audience: But your audience doesn’t agree with it.
8. Burning Wo/Man: You’ve been burned before. (Gentle reminder: That makes you exactly like every great thinker.)
9. No ‘So What:’ Your topic lacks differentiation, making it easy to ignore.
10. Coitus Interruptus: Your observations don’t build towards an actionable climax.

But you can jump over these hurdles. Here’s how:

• Get granular: Steer away from giant sized fears and focus on small do-able projects that build your confidence.
• Get Factual: Nothing beats hyperbole better than cold hard facts. Use research to cut through the emotional clutter.
• Get Creative: There is another way to accomplish your objective. Circle until you find it.
• Get off your High Horse: Compromise. Is there a study you can do to round out your hypothesis or an article you can co-author with a credible third party?

When all else fails, listen. The best thought leaders start by reflecting on the wisdom of others.

Have you encountered another hurdle for this list? How do you jump them?

To reach Elizabeth:

Phone:  212.840.0017 
Email: elizabeth@blisspr.com
Twitter: @elizabethsosnow
LinkedIn: Elizabeth Sosnow